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CHARLES DEANE, LL.D. 



a JHemoir. 



By JUSTIN WINSOR. 




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CHARLES DEANE, LL.D. 



VICE-PRESIDENT MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 



a iHemoir- 



By JUSTIIS^ WIIS^SOR. 



Privately Printed from the Proceedings of the Society. 



CAMBRIDGE : 
JOHN WILSON AND SON. 

2Entb£rsttg ^rtss. 
1891. 






Gift 
American Hisiorical Uevlew 

pp!^ 2 6 132t 



MEMOIR.' 



In February, 1865, just after he had retired from business 
and when he was fifty-two years old, Mr, Deane wrote a brief 
sketch of the earlier part of his life, and brought the narrative 
down to a time when he had already formed those acquaint- 
ances which caused a good part of the enjoyments attending 
his less active but riper years. With this acquaintance broad- 
ening year by year and bringing within his sympathies and in- 
terests many of the foremost historical scholars of his day, he 
began to cultivate habits already formed of epistolary inter- 
course ; and as his fame as an exact student of American his- 
tory grew, he was more and more sought for his opinions and 
counsel on historical questions. This as well as his friend- 
ships fostered a taste for correspondence ; and the large mass 
of letters, full of discussion and inquiry concerning points and 
phases of our history, which he left behind him, would afford 
matter for an interesting biography far more extensive than it 
is customary to insert in the Proceedings of our Society. To 
round out the proportions of this life, so richly endowed in all 
that interests the lover of American history, one would have 
also to go through his abundant and extraordinary library of 
nearly thirteen thousand volumes to find the minutes of his re- 
searches which he scattered so plentifully on fly-leaves and mar- 
gins, and to discover the letteis, memoranda, and scraps which 
he had laid between the leaves of his books. He rarely kept 
a perfect copy of his own letters, and made no use of press- 
copying appliances, and the biographer would have to recover 

1 The engraving accompanying tiiis memoir follows a photograph taken in 
Toronto in May, 1875. 



his letters from his correspondents. But he often preserved his 
first drafts and the notes upon which his letters were based, 
and they will be found in his books or laid within the folds of 
the letters he received. I should judge that he rarely de- 
stroyed a letter ; and the files which bear the names of C. F. 
Adams, Isaac Arnold, George Bancroft, John Russell Bartlett, 
J. Carson Brevoort, George Brinley, John Carter Brown, Rich- 
ard H. Dana, Henry B. Dawson, Henry M. Dexter, Samuel G. 
Drake, Edward Everett, Charles Folsom, Peter Force, Richard 
Frothingham, WilHara Gammel, George W. Greene, H. B. 
Grigsby, Samuel F. Haven, Joseph Hunter, J. G. Kohl, James 
Lenox, George Livermore, H. W. Longfellow, Samuel K. 
Lothrop, J. R. Lowell, W. P. Lunt, R. H. Major, Brantz 
Mayer, J. L. Motley, J. G. Palfrey, Joel Parker, Theophilus 
Parsons, Josiah Quincy, Chandler Bobbins, Lorenzo Sabine, 
Stephen Salisbury, James Savage, N. B. Shurtleff, Jared Sparks, 
Henry Stevens, George Ticknor, John Waddington, Emory 
Washburn, William Willis, Leonard Woods, Thomas H. 
Wynne, — to say nothing of those among the living, — testify 
to the faithfulness of mutual intercourse. All this material 
must be left for some one who may be prompted to be the biog- 
rapher of one who held hardly a second place to any among us, 
as a historical student, as distinct from those historical writers 
who have associated their names with prolonged works. For 
the present purpose there will be enough ground to cover, if 
the story of his life be confined in the main to the printed 
memorials of its literary activity. 

But in the first place we may learn from the brief autobio- 
graphic fragment already referred to, the significance of his 
earlier years. He says : — 

" I was born in Biddeford, in the State of Maine, on the Saco River, 
Nov. 10, 1813. My father. Dr. Ezra Deane, was descended from 
Walter Deane, who with his brother John came from Chard, near 
Taunton in England, and settled in Taunton, Massachusetts, then in 
Plymouth Colony. My father was born in Connecticut, and after get- 
ting his profession of a physician, he removed to Maine, and lived in 
different places before he settled in Biddeford. There his first wife 
died. She was a daughter of the Rev. Paul Coffin, S.T.D., of Buxton, 
Maine. My father afterwards married a daughter (my mother) of the 
Rev. Silas Moody, of Arundel, now Kennebunkport. When old enough I 
went to the public school at Biddeford. For a few quarters I went to the 



5 

vSaco Academy. I also attended a classical school kept by Phineas Pratt, 
formerly preceptor of the academy. [There was thought at this time 
of sending him to Bowdoin College, where an elder brother was at this 
time the classmate of Longfellow.] When not yet sixteen years of age 
I went to Kennebunkport to live with my mother's brother, Silas Moody, 
who kept there a shop, with such variety of merchandise as is usual in 
' Country Stores.' It was my duty to open the store in the morning, 
sweep it out, make the fire when needed, and attend on customers, as I 
was able. The preaching on Sunday was during my stay there a part 
of the time at the old meeting-house where my grandfather once 
preached, and a part of the time at the meeting-house in the village. 
They were two miles apart. The preaching was orthodox, and my uncle 
and aunts were of that persuasion. I remained in Kennebunkport about 
a year and a half, and then I went into the store of Mr. Joseph 
M. Hayes, of Saco (on Cutts or Factory Island). I was expected to 
sleep in the store with the older clerk, and to take my meals at Mr. 
Hayes's house very near the store. I had duties to perform similar to 
those in my uncle's store, but I had harder work. Saco was a flour- 
ishing place, and the York Company's establishment there gave us a 
good deal of business. I had the privilege of spending Sundays at my 
father's house and of going to church with the family. I served Mr. 
Hayes two years, and with letters of introduction from my employer, 
I visited Boston and New York, in the spring of 1833, with a view 
to finding a situation. I had a letter to Messrs. Waterston, Pray, 
& Co. of Boston, into whose employ I finally agreed to go ; and en- 
tered their store, August 23, 1833, as a salesman. I was then over 
nineteen years of age. My situation was a pleasant one, and I believe 
I commended myself to my employers. My agreement for salary was 
two hundred dollars a year until I should be twenty-one. On arriving 
at that age I agreed again with them for three years. In 1840 I was 
advertised a jDartner in the house of Waterston, Pray, & Co., and 
the next year was married to Helen, Mr. Waterston's eldest daughter. 
We went to live in a small but pretty house in Edinboro' Street, 
Boston, which I had bought. 

" Soon after I married I began to add to my slender stock of books. 
I date my love and taste for books and reading, in American history 
especially, from a summer spent in 1843 at Hingham. , I found I did 
not know the distinction between the Old Colony and the Massachu- 
setts Colony, and I desired to inform myself; and soon after I began 
reading about our early history. I found at Burnham's book-shop a 
copy of Morton's 'New England's Memorial,' edition of 1721. I 
bought it and i-ead it. I also bought Young's ' Chronicles of the 
Pilgrims,' which was published a few years before (1841). I also 
read Allen's 'American Biography,' the first edition, 1806. I soon 



6 

after became acquainted with Dr. Alexander Young and Edward A. 
Crowninshield, who were much interested in these early books, and 
their acquaintance gave me new zest for the buying of books. I also 
became acquainted with Mr. Henry Stevens of Vermont, who soon 
afterwards went to London, where he has acted as agent for American 
book-buyers. He has sent me a great many volumes, though few com- 
pared with what he has sent to other purchasers, like Mr. Brown of 
Providence, and Mr. Lenox of New York. My acquaintance also with 
my friend George Livermore has formed a pleasant circumstance in my 
life. He has [1865] a real taste for books, but he does not collect pre- 
cisely in my line. He is interested, however, in literature generally. 
Dr. Young was also a genuine lover of books. In 1846 I wrote an 
article in the ' Evening Transcript ' on the Pilgrims. It was a notice, 
I think, of a paper by George Sumner in the ' Massachusetts Historical 
Collections,' and of another in the ' Christian Examiner.' In that 
article I spoke favorably of Dr. Young's ' Chronicles of the Pilgrims.' 
Dr. Young spoke to me about my article, which he appeared to like ; 
and upon that our acquaintance was formed. He soon after published 
his ' Chronicles of Massachusetts,' and asked me to write a notice of 
it. I bought a copy of the book, and wrote a notice of two columns in 
the ' Boston Courier.' It was not a discriminating- critique. I was 
probably not capable of wi-iting one, though I did criticise the Doctor's 
position in calling Winthrop the first governor of Massachusetts, and 
contended that Endicott was entitled to that honor. In a few years 
(1849) I was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
nominated by Dr. Young. Mr. Livermore was elected at the following 
meeting. 

" Before becoming so much intei-ested in New England history, I 
had been a good deal occupied with the study of mental philosophy, 
or that part of it which relates to the freedom of the will, and I had 
bought and read a good many books on the subject. I had felt deeply 
that the necessitarians had the best of the arguments. I used as I had 
the opportunity to converse with my father on these themes. He was 
a believer in philosophical necessity. 

" I wrote occasionally for the newspapers, and intended to preserve 
such communications for future reference, and indeed have for the most 
part done so.^ 

1 These early newspaper articles by Mr. Deane are all preserved, as well as 
later ones, in a scrap-book which he kept for this purpose. The earliest seems 
to be a paper on the heirs of Miles Standish, published Marcli 31, 1846. The 
article occasioned by George Sumner's contribution was printed May 16; that in 
the "Courier" on Dr. Young's book was July 8. Just after this he made a trip 
to Plymouth, and saw for the first tnue the localities which were to be in the 
future of so much attraction to him. He chronicles this excursion in a paper 
printed August 11. 



" For the past ten years (now February, 1865) I have had con- 
siderable to do in connection with the volumes of the Historical 
Society." 

Here the brief sketch ends. 

Mr. Deane's business career was a successful one ; and when 
he left his mercantile connections, he did so with the satis- 
faction of having passed through his commercial experience 
with credit and an untarnished name. He privately printed 
in 1869 a brief memoir of his father-in-law, under whose eye 
he had made the advances in his business life. Reverting to 
the career of his senior partners, he said : " In 1814 Messrs. 
Waterston & Pray established themselves in Boston ; and the 
firm, under that name and under the style of Waterston, Pray, 
& Co., and subsequently under that of Waterston, Deane, & Co., 
were for many years well known throughout the country, 
first as importers of dry-goods, and afterwards as commission 
merchants for the sale of domestic goods." Mr. Waterston, 
who had emigrated from Scotland in 1806,, retired from active 
business in 1857, then in his eightieth year, leaving the bur- 
den of seniority in the house upon his son-in-law, till the 
latter's final retirement in 1864. Fortune and felicity in af- 
fairs naturally pointed him out for fiduciary offices ; and our 
late associate, the Hon. Samuel C. Cobb, who sat for many 
years with him at the directors' board of one of the oldest in- 
surance companies in Boston, bore testimony, at the meeting 
of this Society which was held to take notice of Mr. Deane's 
death, to his great practical wisdom and keen discrimination 
in business questions, and to the unswerving integrity and un- 
sullied character which were recognized by all who came in 
contact with him. 

Mr. Deane's studies early made him familiar with the as- 
pects of those beginnings of our American history which are 
associated with the banks of the James, in Virginia, and im- 
parted also so much of interest to the diversified shores of New 
England ; and his love of this history never ceased. It is not 
easy to say whether, in the estimation of scholars, he identified 
himself more with the problems of the opening years of the 
Plymouth than of the Virginia Colony. He naturally turned 
in the first instance to the oldest of the New England settle- 
ments ; and the scrap-book which contains his early newspaper 



commuuications shows a great preponderance of interest in 
the Pilgrim story. 

Judge Davis's edition of Morton's " Memorial " had been 
one of the books to interest Mr. Deane in the earliest years of 
his historical study, and he was an eager attendant upon the 
sale of the library which that editor had gathered. It was at 
this sale, in 1847, that he became the possessor of a fragment 
of the original manuscript of Prince's " Annals," which con- 
tained some passages which that author had omitted in the 
printed book, and through which he had run his pen. The 
interest in the Pilgrim history which had been raised in Mr. 
Deane a few years before, when he was first introduced to the 
story of the founders of New Plymouth by perusing Dr. 
Young's " Chronicles of the Pilgrims," led him to understand 
at once the significance of the initial B, which Prince set 
against such passages as had been taken from the then lost 
manuscript history of the Colony by Governor Bradford ; and 
eager to help restore as much as possible the text of that nar- 
rative, and to eke out what had already been done in this 
way by Dr. Young from other sources, he soon communicated 
to the April number (1848) of the " New England Historical 
and Genealogical Register " two paragraphs from that frag- 
mentary manuscript which Prince had cancelled, and which had 
been copied from Bradford. They presented two heretofore 
unknown incidents of the memorable voyage of the " May- 
flower." One was the hurling into the sea by a lurch of the 
ship of John Howland, one of the passengers, and his being 
saved by catching hold of the top-sail halliards, fortunately 
floating on the water at the time ; and the other was the burial 
at sea of one of the seamen. The last incident afforded Mr. 
Deane the text, that a mind of such scrupulous accuracy as his 
found to have a ready application. The statement that one 
" passenger " had died on the voyage had easily been made, 
with ordinary writers, to mean that but a single life was lost ; 
and Mr. Deane threw out a pointed reference to the danger of 
such hasty inferences. The incidents are both so striking 
that one can only account for the failure of Judge Davis to 
note them in his edition of Morton by supposing that he could 
never have read the fragment, which had now passed under 
the scrutiny of younger if not more active eyes. Mr. Drake, 
the editor of the " Register," in introducing Mr. Deane's com- 



9 

municatioii, as from one " who is very curious in all matters 
relating to the beginning of New England," goes on to say 
that this little recovery of a paragraph or two of the Bradford 
history only shows that the recovery of the long-lost manu- 
script was still to be desired, after all that had been done 
in the endeavors to restore it. He and Mr. Deane had no 
suspicion that the clew to such a discovery already existed.^ 

The next number of the same periodical gives us the earliest 
example which we have of Mr. Deane's method of annotating 
historical documents. Its editor, Mr. Drake, possessed an 
original letter addressed, in February, 1631-32, to Governor 
Winthrop, of Massachiffeetts Bay, by Governor Bradford and 
other leading men of the little colon}^ at New Plymouth. 
This document is, perhaps, the most interesting for its group 
of signatures, showing, besides Bradford's, those of Alden, 
Standish, Fuller, and Prence, which we associate with the 
Pilgrim history, and is now in the cabinet of our associate, 
Judge Chamberlain. It was submitted by Mr. Drake to his 
new contributor, and was printed in the July number (1848) 
with his annotations. He had already divined the mean- 
ing of some of the significant passages in the intercourse of 
the two Colonies, and with a caution which characterized him 
through all his critical studies, he simply said that " it has 
sometimes been urged that the early Colony of Massachusetts 
was not so scrupulously regardful of the rights of her weaker 
neighbors as a more enlightened and liberal policy would 
seem to demand." In one of these notes he gives his testimony 
to the laborers already distinguished in this field, to " the 
labors of Davis, Baylies, Young, and others, who have brought 
their united gifts of learning, diligence, and zeal to this work ; 
but the field," he adds, "is not yet exhausted. Mr. Secretary 
Morton," he continues, " would have deserved better of pos- 
terity had he edited and published his uncle's [Governor 
Bradford's] writings, and others which he had in his posses- 
sion, instead of compiling his ' Memorial ' from them. How- 
ever much we may regret that the author had not been more 
minute, [the ' Memorial '] is a work which will never be 
superseded." He then urges that one — it is suspected he 
meant Dr. Young — would undertake a new edition of the 
" Memorial," adding from later stores to the already rich anno- 

1 Mr. Deane made some remarks on this recovered bit of Bradford in our 
Proceedings, April, 1879. 

2 



10 

tations of Judge Davis. But there were developments soon to 
be manifest that would drive all such wishes from his mind. 

There had up to this time been no clew to the region of 
English soil which had nursed the infant church of that body 
of Separatists who after their sojourn in Holland came as pil- 
grims to the New World. Mr. Savage had drawn the attention 
of Mr. Joseph Hunter, a well-known English antiquary, to 
this problem in 1842 ; and it was at that time apparent that 
the truth was within reach. Every student of the Pilgrim 
history was electrified when, in 1849, Mr. Hunter announced 
that he had removed the obscurity. Cotton Mather had given 
the place of Bradford's birth as Awsterfield, but there was no 
such place in the British gazetteers. Hunter, in a tract, " The 
Founders of New Plymouth," which he published in 1849, 
found a record of the birth of Bradford, at Awsterfield ; and 
he set forth much else respecting the relations of Scrooby 
and Austerfield to a little knot of Separatists, gathered there- 
abouts, of whom Brewster and Bradford were the principal 
in interest. 

Presently Judge Davis's estate was to yield another sur- 
prise. The earliest patent which the Pilgrims enjoyed, that 
of June 1, 1621, had so far passed out of sight when Dr. Young 
was engaged in his studies of the Pilgrims, that he could not 
anywhere find it. Davis had noted its discovery early in the 
century in the Land Office in Boston, and it was now found 
among some papers which had once belonged to him. Mr. 
Deane procured a transcript of the document, and prefacing 
it with an explanatory note, he printed it in the second vol- 
ume of the fourth series of Collections of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society in 1854, of which Society he had been at 
this time a member for five years. He also made this little 
reprint the first of the numerous separate reprints which from 
time to time he made of the papers which he contributed to 
serial publications. 

The little book also marks a stage in the history of American 
printing, for he caused four copies of it to be struck off on 
vellum, — the earliest instance of book printing on that material 
in the United States ; and he caused also a single copy to be 
printed on old paper. Besides the vellum copy which he kept 
for himself, he gave one copy to Mr. James Lenox, of New 
York, with whom, as long as this gentleman lived, Mr. Deane 
maintained a correspondence on bibliographical questions. 



11 

Another he gave to his friend Edward A. Crowninshield, who 
was allied to Mr. Deane by sympathies that made them both 
enthusiasts in the collecting of books. This copy was last 
sold at the Menzies sale, for -$51, and is the only one of the 
four which has come upon the market. The fourth copy was 
given by him to perhaps the dearest of his friends, whose 
companionship was made close by the relations of neighbor, 
and whose character and studies peculiarly commended them- 
selves to him, — George Livermore. 

Mr. Deane had hardly placed this bibliographical enterprise 
to his own credit, when another event characterized the same 
year (1855), and served to place his name at once among 
the chief authorities on Pilgrim history. The story of the 
losing and finding of the Bradford manuscript has already 
been told by the present writer in the Proceedings of this 
Society, Nov. 10, 1881. That paper was written in close com- 
munion with Mr. Deane, and with dependence in part upon 
papers lodged with him by the two contestants for the honor 
of the recognition. To make the story on this occasion brief, 
it is enough to say that the history of Plymouth Plantation 
by Governor Bradford had not been traced by American stu- 
dents since it disappeared about the time of the outbreak of 
the American Revolution. By some means, not apparent, it 
had found its way into the library of the Bishop of London at 
Fulham Palace. Here during the preceding fifteen or twenty 
years it had been seen and read by two persons studying the 
history of Episcopacy in America, and they had each used and 
referred to it in their publications. These were the Bishop 
of Oxford, who in his " Protestant Episcopal Church in 
America," published in 1844, had cited it as a " Manuscript 
History of the Plantation at Plymouth," and the Rev. J. S. 
M. Anderson, who in his "History of the Colonial Church," 
published in 1848, had explicitly referred to it as written by 
Governor Bradford and as having been used by Prince. In a 
most surprising way these citations had escaped the attention 
of every one especially interested in Pilgrim history, till the 
late Mr. John Wingate Thornton noted the reference in the 
Bishop of Oxford's book, and was so struck with the chance 
it afforded of a clew to new material, that he brought it to the 
notice of the Rev. John S. Barry. This gentleman, then at 
work on his history of Massachusetts, had a more immediate 



12 

incentive to study the citations, and soon discovered that if the 
manuscript was not Bradford's — Anderson's book was not yet 
in evidence — it must be a part of it, or in whole or in part 
a copy of it. Mr. Barry had ah-eady had much occasion to 
consult with Mr. Deane during the progress of his history ; 
and in the first volume of it, then in press, he had said of him 
that " few were more conversant with the early history of 
Massachusetts," and had spoken of " his well-stored library 
as a treasure of rare works on American history." To no 
one then could the fortunate identifier of the extracts which 
Bishop Wilberforce gave go with a surer chance of recipro- 
cated delight than to Mr. Deane ; and Mr. Barry found him in 
a ready frame of receptivity and eager with suggestions. Mr. 
Deane looked over the evidence as Mr. Barry presented it, 
and could but agree with his friend's conclusions. He had 
just been designated by the Historical Society to make up 
and edit a volume of their Collections, and was already con- 
templating a study of Pilgrim history for it, in a collection of 
Winslow Papers, when he saw a better chance in the editing 
of the manuscript of Bradford if their hopes were realized. 
Mr. Hunter's discoveries respecting the English part of the 
Pilgrim field had already made him and Mr. Deane corre- 
spondents, and it happened that Mr. Deane just at this moment 
was preparing to write to this new epistolary acquaintance. 
It was a resolution easily grasped to make this new suspicion 
the subject of his letter to Mr. Hunter, and to solicit his medi- 
ation with the Bishop of London in order to establish the fact. 
To lose no time, he authorized Mr. Hunter to secure a careful 
transcjipt, if the manuscript proved to be Bradford's ; and 
to aid in determining that point, an original letter of Brad- 
ford's was enclosed for comparison of handwriting. At the 
next meeting of this Society (April, 1855) he reported what 
he had done in their name, and received their thanks. In 
August he was enabled to lay the copy which Mr. Hunter had 
sent before the Society, when he at once began his editorial 
task. " I was engaged in a conscientious work," he said ; and 
almost every Liverpool packet for some time carried over que- 
ries about some word or sentence of the copy, to be verified 
by the manuscript, — for Mr. Hunter had been allowed by the 
Bishop to retain the precious document for a while in anticipa- 
tion of such difficulties. 



13 

Mr. Deane was desirous of annotating thoroughly the his- 
tory ; but it had never been the custom of the Society to print 
original material with such annotations as Judge Davis had 
supplied to Morton's " Memorial," and as Mr. Savage had be- 
stowed upon Winthrop's Journal. Mr. Savage, who was at this 
time the President of the Society, favored the traditional habit, 
and it was only after some delay that it was finally determined 
that the manuscript should be annotated ; but not to the ex- 
tent to which Mr. Deane would have liked to carry it. The 
innovation however established a precedent ; and no question 
of the propriety of such elucidatory helps has since been 
raised in the Society.^ 

It was a widely expressed wish, in later years, that Mr. 
Deane should recur to this work, and give a new edition with 
all the amplitude of his erudition in commentary and note. 
He sometimes spoke to me as if he were inclined to the task, 
and I know that a publisher stood ready to undertake the 
issue. Our associate, Mr. C. F. Adams, Jr., in bringing up 
in 1883 the question of the propriety of reproducing in print 
the abbreviations and other perplexities common in seven- 
teenth-century manuscripts, referred to the literal manner in 
which Mr. Deane had printed Bradford, and added : " I have 
long been urging him to bring out a new edition of the book, 
with which his name should stand always inseparably con- 
nected ; and I have urged it not only because we may have a 
more copious annotation, but also because I want to see Brad- 
ford's English in a real seventeenth-century dress," — as the 
press of that day would have given it. This led Mr. Deane 
to remark at the close of Mr. Adams's paper : " I should prob- 
ably go farther than he has gone in claiming for an editor the 
exercise of a more radical power in adapting such material to 
the use of modern readers." He goes on elucidating further 

1 This was the first publication of tlie Society of such general interest that an 
edition for public sale was deemed desirable. When a few years later he visited 
Fulham, Mr. Deane took with him a copy of the book in which he had checked 
certain passages for further verification, and he had an opportunity during sev- 
eral hours to compare them with the manuscript. The result is noted in a copy 
which he kept for correction, and which is in his own library. The changes are 
of little importance ; but there are a few of some interest in the list of the " May- 
flower " passengers, printed at tlie end of tlie narrative. Tliis corrected copy also 
bears the following memoranda : " 185(i, Monday, May 12. A few copies came 
from the binder. Tuesday, May 20, a notice of the book in some of the public 
papers. Wednesday, May 21, the book pubhshed by Little, Brown, & Co." 



14 

his editorial canons: "I directed that an exact transcript of 
the Bradford manuscript should be made, being very desirous 
to secure a correct text. On receiving it I found that it not 
only abounded in abbreviated words, but that many words as 
spelled out by the writer were spelled quite differently from 
any examples to be found in printing-offices in England in 
Bradford's time. Bradford had a spelling of his own. To 
words of Latin origin that came into our language through 
the French he would give a French termination, but his pecu- 
liarities were not confined to words such as these. If I had 
attempted to spell out Bradford's abbreviations, I might have 
been at a loss in some instances, though I apprehend not many, 
to know how to spell them, — that is to say, to know how 
Bradford would have spelled them. In some manuscripts the 
difficulty here would be serious, as it involves the question 
how to deal with the writings of the ignorant and illiterate." 

We have an instance of what he means in this last statement 
in one of the papers which he prints in the Trumbull Papers, 
where in referring to the paper he says: " It was written by a 
very illiterate hand, and it seems hazardous to meddle with its 
orthography or punctuation. We therefore print the paper 
verbatim et literatim, and leave it to the reader to make out 
its meaning." 

In concluding these remarks occasioned by Mr. Adams's 
paper Mr. Deane said : " There can be no difference of opinion 
as to the duty of an editor to retain the language, that is, the 
words of a writer, however awkward the form may be in 
which they are preserved." He enlarges in another place on 
what he believed to be the function of an editor. It is in the 
preface to Smith's "True Relation," where he says: " Where 
the meaning of the author has been obscured or perverted by 
the defective print, or where he has himself failed to express 
his thoughts clearly, I have ventured to make suggestions in 
the notes. Where the meaning is apparent at once to the 
intelligent reader, notwithstanding the defects in punctuation 
and in the grammatical construction of the sentences, I have 
usually left the page without comment." ^ 

1 Mr. Deane, in a review of Veazie's edition of Calef and Mather's " Wonders 
of the Invisible World," which he printed in the "Boston Daily Advertiser," 
March 24, ISOS, showed his scrutiny of the non-observance of proper editorial 
canons. There were two reprints of this article, in separate and sumptuous form, 



15 

Mr. Deane never had the opportunity again of doing a like 
conspicuous service to the student of Pilgrim history, although 
in 1863 he printed some descriptive verses of Governor Brad- 
ford from the original manuscript, and in 1870 he printed in 
the Society's Proceedings a dialogue in which Bradford had 
marked some changes in the religious life and feelings, as 
between what he denominates " old men and j^oung men." 
Mr. Deane's library contained one of the very few copies which 
are known of the sermon which Elder Cushman delivered 
at Plymouth in 1621 ; and when a photo-lithograph facsimile 
of the little tract was published in 1870, Mr, Deane supplied 
the preface. In 1871 he brought forward a letter of Sir John 
Stanhope, which threw a little light on the early history of 
Elder Brewster. In 1873 he was a guest at one of the cele- 
brations in connection with the monument to Miles Standish 
in Duxbury, and the printed record of the meeting contains a 
report of a speech which he made. 

His interest in everything touching the leaders of the Pil- 
grims or which concerned the Colony's history never waned ; 
and there was no limit to the sympathy which he felt with the 
late Dr. Dexter in his studies respecting their life and condi- 
tion in England and Holland. He never failed to attend any 
commemoration of their deeds, and I have wandered with him 
over the scenes of their pleasures and trials. I went with him 
once to Plymouth in company with a group of Harvard stu- 
dents, who wished to traverse the fields of the Pilgrim activity. 
He was the one to whom everybody listened, as in the Court 
House, with the early records spread before the eager youths, 
or at Pilgrim Hall or upon the Burial Hill he told the story 
which each document or scene suggested. A few years ago, 
when it devolved upon me to deliver the anniversary address 
at Duxbury in commemoration of the town's incorporation in 
1637, he followed with me every step in the preparation of 
the paper, with the same care and eagerness as if he had 
been the chosen speaker. In the last years of his life he also 
took up the story of the Pilgrim days with pleasure. He re- 
ported upon the will of Peregrine White, in the Proceedings 

for which he was not responsible in either case. One was called No. 1 of a 
series of Bibliographical Tracts, with a sub-title of " Spurious Reprints of Early 
Books " (no second number was issued) ; and who was responsible for the other 
edition he never knew. 



16 

of November, 1886 ; he edited the records of the Old Colony 
Club, whose formation antedated the Revolution, in October, 
1887. In December, 1888, he revived much of his interest in 
the hulk of the old ship which was found buried in the sand of 
Cape Cod, twenty-five years before, and which had engaged 
his attention at that time as in all probabilit}' that of a vessel 
named the " Sparrow-hawk " wrecked on the Cape in the Pil- 
grim days. He took satisfaction in finding that his renewed 
attention to the hulk, which had been lost sight of for many 
years, resulted in the remains finding a permanent place in the 
building of the Pilgrim Society at Plymouth. (Proceedings, 
December, 1888.) I have seen him handle many of his books 
tenderly ; but he always seemed to be reverent in his aspect 
when he took down from his shelves Edwin Sandys's " State of 
Religion" (1605) and laid before a visitor the page on which 
John Robinson, the Pilgrims' pastor, had inscribed his name ; 
for besides the sanctification of that autograph, he was fond 
of drawing attention to certain passages in the book which 
might have been the prototypes of parts of Robinson's Fare- 
well Address at Delfthaven. 

Mr. Deane's interest in the elder colony, on the James 
River, might almost mate that which he felt for the Pilgrim 
history ; and perhaps upon no one character had he bestowed 
more thought than upon Captain John Smith, who served him 
as a sort of link to connect the early puritan and separatist 
history of North Virginia — become, by Smith's naming. New 
England — with the cavalier story of the Chesapeake region. I 
think that he felt he had more closely connected his name 
with that of Smith than with any other historical character. 
When Edward Arber issued his edition of Smith's works in 
1881, he spoke of Mr. Deane as one " who had done more 
than any man living to perpetuate the name and fame of 
Captain John Smith"; and referring to his own efforts, Mr. 
Arber added that " Mr. Deane was the proper person to have 
brought out this collected edition of Captain Smith's works." 

The first public indication of his interest in Smith grew out 
of some correspondence which he had with Mr. Lenox re- 
specting the maps which Smith had given in his books on 
Virginia and New England, in which the joint efforts of these 
two scholars were directed to establish the sequence of the dif- 



17 

ferent editions of the maps, and to associate their publication 
with the particular tracts to which they belonged, inasmuch 
as the subject had become much obscured by the way in 
which dealers had shifted the maps in copies of different 
tracts, made up for the eyes of collectors. It was neces- 
sary to find copies of these tracts so far as was possible in 
their original bindings ; and this involved a wide examina- 
tion of libraries. Both gentlemen used Norton's " Literary 
Gazette " as the medium of their communications. This was 
in 1854. 

In 1856, when Dr. George H. Moore drew the attention of 
scholars to the fact that Anderson, in his " Church of England 
in the Colonies," had also used the Bradford manuscript, this 
book served also to bring into notice Anderson's reference to 
another manuscript, preserved in the Archiepiscopal Palace at 
Lambeth, which had before been unknown to students of early 
Virginia history, though it was evident that Purchas had used 
such a paper. Mr. Deane, attracted by what Anderson had 
said, after "some delay and some difficulties surmounted," 
procured a transcript, which he intended to edit at his con- 
venience ; but being put on the Publication Committee of the 
American Antiquarian Society, he laid it before that body at 
the October meeting in 1859, and in presenting it for their 
consideration, he outlined the argument, which tended, as the 
record runs, " to show that the story of Pocahontas, as com- 
monly received, was probably apocryphal." This was the 
first intimation that the favorite romance of American history, 
the saving of Smith's life by Pocahontas, the daughter of 
Powhatan, had been put to a critical test. The latest explorer 
of the secrets of the earl}^ Virginia history, Mr. Alexander 
Brown, referring to Mr. Deane's questioning of the state- 
ments which Smith had embodied in the " Generall His- 
toric," so at variance with that author's earlier presentations, 
speaks of those who had before this questioned Smith's ve- 
racity, but adds that " Dr. Deane was the first to suggest 
an intelligent analysis of his writings for freeing our early his- 
tory from the meshes of his fable." It was by a process 
of critical analysis and comparison, with the aid of reflected 
light from other sources, that Mr. Deane, in studying Wing- 
field's " Discourse," the manuscript found at Lambeth, 
made that romantic story the crucial test of Smith's veracity, 



18 

— an argument which he further strengthened when a few 
years later he returned to the subject, while editing Smith's 
" True Relation." 

The result of Mr. Deane's criticism probably warrants the 
statement of Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, in his " History of 
American Literature," when he says that " this pretty story 
has now lost historical credit, and is generally given up by 
critical students of our early history." Judge Washburn, at 
a meeting of the Antiquarian Society a few 3^ears after that 
Society had published the "Discourse" of Wingfield, under 
Mr. Deane's supervision, spoke of the " iconoclastic severity 
of research of one of our most industrious and infallible mem- 
bers, who has demolished at a blow the image of female cour- 
age and devotion which has so long emblazoned the name of 
Pocahontas." 

It is a question, however, if Mr. Deane himself could have 
been considered as claiming the accomplishment of so thorough 
a demolition. He professes no more than " to suggest that 
this story is one of the embellishments with which Smith's 
later works were sometimes adorned." While the view which 
he advanced is extremely probable, it lacks the final proof, and 
is at best a negative argument ; which, while it has commended 
itself to writers like Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and 
Alexander Brown, and has been pushed farther by Edward 
D. Neill, has not convinced, on the other hand, some of the 
upholders of a faith in Smith, particularly in Virginia itself, 
where William Wirt Henry and others have contended for 
the favorite belief. 

Mr. Deane's edition of Wingfield was published in the 
Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society in 1860 ; 
and a small edition (one hundred copies) was published 
separately by the editor, in the same year, some earlier im- 
pressions which bear the date of 1859 having been " can- 
celled because of a few errors," and even copies which had 
been distributed were recalled. 

From the time that Mr. Deane published his " True Rela- 
tion" down to 1885, when he reverted to the Pocahontas 
story in the "Magazine of American History" (vol. xiii.), he 
published nothing more on the topic ; and he said in this 
last paper that his views had excited an attention which he 
had never anticipated. " Much," he says, " has been written 



19 

during the last twenty-five years on both sides of the question. 
Some of the criticisms, which early met my eye, by Southern 
writers opposed to my view were temperate in spirit and ex- 
cellent in taste ; but I sometimes felt that the authors of them 
were not fully informed on the subject, — that the bibliogra- 
phy of the case had not been mastered. On the other hand 
several newspaper articles which were sent to me were dis- 
courteous and passionate in tone, while others were personally 
abusive," styling him, as he said, a " ruthless Yankee," who 
had rifled " our very history of its choicest traditions." 

In this last paper Mr. Deane expresses himself as particu- 
larly pleased with Mr. Henry Adams's paper in the " North 
American Review" (January, 1867), because he found it an 
admirable presentation of the whole question, giving a com- 
parison of Smith's earlier and later statements throughout in 
a very effective manner, and " showing how little reliance 
could be placed on the redoubtable captain as a truthful narra 
tor of events, particularly in his later works, where his vanity 
and strong love of the marvellous disposed him to garnish the 
stories of his early adventures." 

When the Civil War broke oat, a few months after the pub- 
lication of his Wingfield, bringing as it did a cessation to the 
community of interest which he had established with some of 
the Virginian antiquarians, this disruption of friendly relation 
was added to his regrets as a patriot to make the begin- 
ning of hostilities to him a painful event. Nothing, however, 
of sentiment, friendly or agreeable, could swerve him from his 
devotion to his duty as a citizen; and he never forgot the part 
which the Republican party did in restoring the national unity, 
and remained steadfast in his allegiance to it, in later years, 
when many of his associates thought that its usefulness had 
passed. 

The campaign on the Potomac brought back to him the 
associations of the early history of that region ; and in October, 
1864, he read to the Antiquarian Society a paper on the his- 
toric points on the James, connected with the movements of 
the contending forces. 

When the war was over, he returned again to his study of 
these early tracts of Smith ; and the reprints of the " Adver- 
tisements for Unexperienced Planters," and " The Descrip- 
tion of New England," both issued at Boston in 1865, bear 



20 

evidence of his care ; but it was in the next year, 1866, that he 
bestowed his best care upon a reissue of Smith's " True Rela- 
tion of Virginia." Mr. Deane approached the consideration 
of this earliest of all the Virginian published narratives with 
no abatement of his interest in Smith, notwithstanding his 
criticism upon his veracity. He still could call him " the 
master spirit of the Colony," and thought that he was now 
dealing with a narrative which had been written before he 
had occasion for " embellishments." It is, he says, "an appar- 
ently faithful history of the Colony for the period which it 
includes. When Captain Smith," he adds, "comes in collision 
with others in authority in the Colony, some allowance per- 
haps should be made for his strong prejudices, and it is always 
well, if possible, to read their versions of the story in con- 
nection with his." He referred here to the " Discourse " of 
Wingfield, in which the latter had defended himself from 
some of the charges made against him by Smith. His edito- 
rial labors upon " The True Relation " brought him again 
into reciprocal correspondence with Mr. Lenox, on the biblio- 
graphical side of his problem ; and he found that scholarly 
collector the laborious coadjutor in such questions which he 
always proved himself to be when there was something to 
receive as well as to give. I have often found Mr. Deane to 
acknowledge the great helpfulness and exhaustiveness of that 
gentleman's bibliographical correspondence, and it was some 
gratification to my friend to know that my own experience 
with Mr. Lenox could add to his testimony. Something akin 
to the help which Mr. Lenox was to him on that side, was the 
assistance which Mr. Bancroft afforded him on the purely 
historical side in opening his stores of manuscripts on early 
Virginia history, derived from the English State Paper 
Office. 

Mr. Deane's editorial work did not fail of recognition. 
Professor Tyler referred to its admirable manner, its fulness 
of learning, and its great accuracy. 

Mr. Deane was now on the eve of seeing for himself the 
treasures, of record and print, with which his labors had made 
him familiar. At the meeting of the American Antiquarian 
Society, in April, 1866, Mr. Haven, the librarian, and Mr. 
Deane were chosen to represent the Society at an Archaeo- 
logical Congress to be held in Antwerp ; and later our associate, 



21 

Dr. Peabody, was joined to the delegation. They sailed on 
June 6 ; and though their main purpose was not effected on 
account of the postponement of the Congress for a year, the 
trip was far from a barren one. He made a very full record 
of his movements and observations in a file of letters which 
his family preserve ; and some of those, in whole or in part, 
which he addressed to the President of the Historical Society 
were printed in its Proceedings. Dr. Peabody has also fur- 
nished some memoranda. " We stayed," he says, " two or 
three days at Chester, where Mr. Deane of course found 
great delight. At Oxford it was vacation ; but Mr. Deane 
made the acquaintance of Mr. Coxe, of the Bodleian Library, 
and received various civilities from him." It was at the Bod- 
leian that he saw the extremely rare original edition (1588) 
of Hariot's " Newfoundland of Virginia," which he had only 
known in the text of Hakluyt and De Bry, and I am not sure 
that Mr. Lenox at this time did not possess the only copy 
which I know of in America. Another book which greatly 
interested him was the 1620 edition of Smith's " New Eng- 
lands Trials " ; and he wrote home of it that there was no 
copy known in the United States, — though he himself pos- 
sessed the somewhat enlarged edition of 1622. He found the 
Bodleian copy to differ a little from that in the British Mu- 
seum ; and from a transcript of it, which Mr. Coxe procured 
for him, he caused it to be reprinted in our Proceedings in 
1873.1 

" At London," says Dr. Peabody, " we lodged in Norfolk 
Street. We had kind attentions from Mr. Adams, our minis- 
ter, and from Mr. Morse, our consul. Mr. Deane spent a good 
deal of time on antiquarian matters with Mr. Henry Stevens 
and Mr. Parker." 

In a letter to his family (July 1), Mr. Deane speaks of an 
excursion to Greenwich as follows : — 

" We went to dine, by invitation, with a club of gentlemen called 
the Noviomagians, — all being members of the Society of Antiquaries. 
The President of the club is Mr. S. C. Hall ; both he and Mrs. Hall 
were present. I understand the origin of the club to be this : There 
was an old Roman station in England called Noviomagus, but its loca- 
tion is unknown. This society was formed with the plan of discovering 

1 He also printed a private edition of fifty copies. 



22 

its site, and they meet once a month at different places with the osten- 
sible purpose of investigation. The truth is, they meet to have a 
dinner and a good time." 

While in Loudon he examined at the Public Record Office 
what there is remaining of the Records of the Council for New 
England ; and he was not so successful as he had hoped to 
be from an inspection of Captain Newport's " Discovery," in 
solving the mooted question of its authorship. At Lambeth 
he inspected the manuscript of Wingfield's " Discourse." At 
Guildhall he was delighted to find among the antiquities a 
form of pipe, common in the early half of the seventeenth 
century, which corresponded exactly with the shape of one 
which was discovered in the wreck of the old ship at Cape 
Cod ; and its corresponding shape went a great way to sat- 
isfy him of the antiquity of that hulk. He went to St, 
Sepulchre's to look upon the burial-place of Captain Smith, 
with none of the scepticism that has since been raised re- 
garding the identity of the spot ; but he was disappointed 
to find a carpet between his tread and the slab upon which 
so many visitors have traced the three Turks' heads. But 
his visit to Fulham was his chief enjoyment. He saw and 
handled the precious manuscript of Bradford, as the pres- 
ent writer did at a later day. He was delighted to find in 
it a fly-leaf inscription in Prince's hand, which had escaped 
the attention of Hunter, and which added to the history of 
the document ; and he found two other volumes of manu- 
scripts which, by the book-plates in them, had likewise been 
taken from the Prince Library, — the former repository of 
the Bradford. He also, as already stated, made a partial ver- 
ification of his own printed text.-^ In the interval since it 
was first brought to the attention of American scholars, no one 
from the land of its origin had seen it. Two years after Mr. 
Deane had published it, Dr. John Waddington, giving a lec- 
ture in South wark (1858), had exhibited it to his audience, 

1 Mr. Deane made two visits to Fulham, — tlie first was to a garden party 
given by the Bishop, wlien he merely glanced at the Bradford manuscript and 
made arrangements for a more careful examination of it at a later day. On this 
occasion he spent four hours, " sitting in tiie same room with a number of young 
candidates for the ministry who had come to be examined by the Bishop." He 
declined an invitation to lunch, and lost not a precious minute of the time which 
he had to give to a collation of the manuscript. 



23 

and had said : " So far as we know, not a person now living in 
the lands of the Pilgrims has ever seen this manuscript. It 
has been kept at Fulham among the papers of no use to the 
See. It is not in the catalogue of the library, and probably 
is not included in any inventory of the property." The rev- 
erend gentleman then urges that steps be taken for its return 
to New England. Two years after this (1860), Mr. Deane's 
friend, the then President of this Society, had represented 
that the Prince of Wales, in his proposed visit to the United 
States, could very gracefully bring it, and so restore it to its 
former ownership. The necessary interposition of an act of 
Parliament to accomplish such a transfer stood in the way at 
that time, as it did some years later, when, at the instance of 
the present writer, our minister, Mr. Motley, made similar in- 
quiries. I know that Mr. Deane finally shared my own feel- 
ing, that it would be better for it to remain where it is ; and 
during a recent second visit which I have paid to Fulham, I 
was glad to learn of the interest with which it is regarded, 
and of the steps which the present Bishop is taking to put 
the muniments and other manuscripts of his diocese in better 
order. 

Mr. Deane made various trips from London, and took in 
his way at different times some of the interesting regions 
which the ordinary tourist traverses. But he saw other sights 
that pleased him more. He was at Althorpe, and saw that 
private library in all Europe perhaps which offers most al- 
lurements to a lover of books. He was at Bawtry, where 
some fiiends of Richard Monckton Milnes — afterward Lord 
Houghton — made it very pleasant for him to visit Scrooby 
and Austerfield ; and he has chronicled this visit to the shrine 
of Bradford in the preface to his edition of Bradford's Dia- 
logue in our Proceedings in 1870. 

" We afterward went to Cambridge," says Dr. Peabody, 
" but found nobody there that we wanted to see ; then to Bos- 
ton, and you would have to go through Thomson's History of 
Boston for the list of the spots there which Mr. Deane visited 
with the searching eye of a practised antiquary, so that to him 
I owe a more lifelike remembrance of all I saw there than of 
any other town in England. We went from England to Bel- 
gium, thence to Switzerland, and I parted from Mr. Deane at 
the glacier of the Rhone. All that I can say of him is that he 



24 

was as pleasant a fellow traveller and sojourner as ever man 
could be, and that the intimacy of several weeks only intensi- 
fied every impression as to his sterling worth, his genuine kind- 
ness, and his breadth of mind and heart that I had formed 
from previous acquaintance. I think that he fully enjoyed 
his stay in England. His unfamiliarity with any language 
but his own seemed to impair his enjoyment of the Con- 
tinent ; for English was not then the universal language 
which it has now become, and there were various occasions 
on which Mr. Deane felt the lack of a ready medium of 
intercourse." 

This lack of facility in other tongues was during all his 
student life an impediment in research which met him in va- 
rious directions. His scant training in Latin in his youth was 
not increased by a subsequent college career, as at one time 
it was expected it would be, and he had to depend on others 
for the interpretation of the Latin which he found in Peter 
Martyr, De Bry, and various other of the older sources ; and 
it was a particular regret to him that he was balked in this 
way in his study of the inscriptions on the Cabot mappe- 
ynonde, which was for many years a theme for his investiga- 
tions. It was about the only thing on the Continent that he 
saw upon which he could bring to bear the great stress of his 
historical learning. He inspected it in the great library at 
Paris, and made a friendship over it with one of the officers * 
of the library that led to a later correspondence.^ But these 
impediments were not unsurmountable, and he spared no 
pains or expense in getting the services of the best experts in 
unravelling the intricacies of debased Latin and archaic Span- 
ish and Italian. There is an evidence of this in the paper on 
these same inscriptions which he left unfinished at his death, 
but which he intiusted to the hands of Mr. C. C. Smith. It 
has since been communicated to our Proceedings (1891). 

Late in the season of 1866 he returned to America, and was 
able, at the meeting of the Antiquarian Society at Worcester 
in October, to render some account of his trip. 

' In a letter of September 5 he speaks of finding exposed for sale on the Quai 
Voltaire a copy of Jomard's fecsimile of the Cabot map ; and from the dealer on 
the Quai he got his first dew to the repository of the original in the Bibliotheque 
Imperiale, where the next day he had the satisfaction of inspecting it and making 
memoranda from it for future use. 



25 

This account of his European -experience has interrupted 
the story of his devotion to Virginia history. Mention has 
already been made of the interest with which he observed a 
rare copy of one of Smith's books which he saw in the Bod- 
leian. In the London Society of Antiquaries Jie had been 
interested in what he could glean of Smith from a broadside 
prospectus of his " Generall Historic " (1624), and in the 
Public Record Office he had seen Smith's letter to Lord Ba- 
con, and by the favor of Mr. Henry Adams, then secretary to 
his father, the American minister in London, he had pro- 
cured a copy of Smith's will, which he communicated to the 
Proceedings of our Society in January, 1867. We find also 
in the same volume a communication upon Bacon's " Rebellion 
on the James." 

In 1872 he accompanied Mr. Haven on a trip through the 
Southern States ; and he did not fail to make it an opportunity 
of comparing the copy of the records of the Virginia Company 
which is preserved in Richmond with another which he had 
seen in Washington. 

I well remember, in the later years of his life, when he re- 
ceived a letter from a retired student in Virginia, who had been 
made familiar with all that Mr. Deane had done for Virginia 
history, while in the country, away from libraries. Depending 
on his own exertions, this gentleman had been studying, with 
little intercourse with kindred spirits, the earliest history of 
the movement for settling Virginia. He had come to a stand 
for want of access to some of the rarest of the early tracts, 
and he knew they were in Mr. Deane's library. He wrote to 
him, telling his straightforward story, to ask if he might borrow 
them. His letter showed that he had no ordinary curiosity. 
His manner easily convinced one that he knew whereof he 
was writing. Mr. Deane was struck with one of his pleas for 
the favor ; and I trust that the gentleman will pardon me, if 
this memoir chances to fall under his eye, for mentioning it. 
He had served in the Confederate forces, and was in Fort 
Fisher at the time the Federal commander sought to demolish 
that stronghold by the explosion near it of a heavily stored 
powder-boat. Mr. Deane's correspondent said that about the 
only mischief which the explosion did was to damage the 
drums of his ears so severely that he had hardly heard any- 
thing since, and that this barrier to social intercourse had had 

4 



26 

something to do with his devotion to historical studies. He 
moreover thought the North owed him something for what 
had been inflicted upon him ! 

No man loved his books more tenderly than Mr. Deane ; and 
I know that on more than one occasion when I have been with 
him on journeys from Cambridge, a thought for the safety of 
his books which he had left behind, was not far from his mind. 
He told the Society once, in speaking of his acquaintance with 
Dr. Kohl, while that gentleman was living in Cambridge, how 
he lent " arrafuls of books" to him ; and once when the Doc- 
tor was leaving his house, "he slung a large package of books 
over his shoulder like a travelling pack, and trudged off with 
them in a drifting snowstorm, making me almost tremble for 
my precious volumes." In his memoir of Mr. Livermore he 
again shows what a solicitude he had about the ordinary 
treatment of books. He said of his friend, — 

" He knew how to open a book without breaking its back, and to turn 
over its leaves so that its owner would not tremble. There is a knack 
in all this, known only to the true lover of books, — to him who rever- 
ences not merely the author, or the author's thoughts, but the concrete 
object before him." 

There was a struggle between his kindly feelings for his 
new-found sympathizer in Virginia and his thoughts of the 
dangers which his treasures might encounter on the transit 
or by accident in distant service. I left him one evening de- 
bating upon his duty. The next day he told me he had sent 
the books; and he never regretted the assistance which he had 
given in this and in many other ways to the author of the 
" Genesis of the United States." Mr. Alexander Brown in his 
preface says that Mr. Deane " gave his helping hand from the 
beginning to the end ; and his last letter to me," he adds, " is 
expressive of his interest and great faith in my work." I well 
know the endeavors which Mr. Deane made to help the author 
get his manuscript into a shape that the publishers could ap- 
prove, and the great delight he felt in some developments 
which researches in the archives at Simancas, conducted in 
Mr. Brown's interest, had produced in throwing light on the 
voyage of Pring, it may be, to the New England coast, and 
the abortive settlement of the Popham Company. In Mr. 
Brown's book he supplied the note on St. George's fort, in 



27 

illustrating the plan which had been found at Simancas. 
" One would think," he says in this note, " that the walls of 
so formidable a structure [as delineated on the plan] would 
have shown something more than a mere ruin after the lapse 
of only seventeen years " ; and then he quotes Maverick's ac- 
count of it in 1624, where this settler says he " found roots and 
garden herbs and some old walls." If Mr. Deane could have 
lived to see Mr. Brown's volumes published, and have longer 
considered the plan, he might have been conscious that an 
exaggeration, which he plainly suspected, may possibly have 
had a purpose, when the plan was put in the hands of the 
Spanish ambassador in London, of imposing upon the Spanish 
Court a false notion of its strength. With this interest in 
Mr. Brown's labors, Mr. Deane closed almost with his life his 
interest in Virginia history. 

In tracing thus his special attention to the stories of the 
Plymouth and Virginia colonizations, we must not understand 
that Mr. Deane's studies were bound by such limitations. 
Every phase of New England history and many of a broader 
American study engaged at different times his vigilance. 

As early as 1850 he printed in the " New England His- 
torical and Genealogical Register" a manuscript which had 
come into his hands, going over the devious tracks of the 
Gorton controversy, which proved to be almost identical with 
Edward Winslow's defence of Massachusetts, " Hypocrasie 
Unmasked," against Gorton's attacks in his " Simplicities 
Defence," both published in 1646. In introducing this paper 
and others appertaining, he gave an outline of Gorton's puz- 
zling career. In referring to Winslow's book, he speaks of 
it as of exceeding rarity, and adds : " Two or three copies 
of the work are now owned here [one was in his own library] ; 
and as it contains much valuable matter, it should be re- 
printed." The urgency of a reprint is as strong now as 
then. 

Few of our students have been more familiar with the older 
chroniclers of Massachusetts than Mr. Deane. He had a great 
admiration for the historical work of Hutchinson. In a little 
essay on the bibliographical questions connected with Hutch- 
inson's history, which he printed first in the " Historical Maga 
zine," and later in an improved shape in our Proceedings 



28 

for February, 1857, he says: "To the curious and critical 
Hutchinson will always have a value ; but to the student who 
seeks for the sources of our history, his work will always be 
indispensable " ; and thirty years later, when he had occasion 
to review the writers on New England history, he spoke of 
Hutchinson as having " a genius for history." 

In 1860 he brought another of the old writers under review, 
while calling attention to the sections of the diary of Cotton 
Mather, which are preserved in the cabinets of the Historical 
and Antiquarian Societies, He says: — 

''The Journal of Cotton Mather has not been published, although 
extracts have been made from it from time to time, and perhaps excep- 
tions might be made to certain parts of it as improper, useless, and un- 
interesting ; and yet we think that much of it and perhaps the larger 
portion would be found to be valuable and full of interest. Although 
there is a great deal about himself, his illuminations, his resolves, and 
his struggles, the special providences by which he was surrounded and 
upheld, yet these furnish in many respects a good illustration of the 
faith and religious condition of that period. Taken as a whole the 
diary is a psychological curiosity, and gives an excellent index to his 
character. There is beside a sufficient reference to public characters 
and events to make the work valuable in a strictly historical point 
of view." 

Two years later he drew from these fragmentary journals 
such of the entries as shed light upon the curious work best 
associated with Mather's name, his " Magnalia," and published 
his results in our Proceedings for December, 1862. This 
" Magnalia " was a book often in his hands ; and he rendered 
a service to many a possessor of the original edition by adding 
to such copies, what they usually lacked, — a list of errata, 
which he had printed in facsimile for his own copy. After 
many years' experience in the use of that book he was ready 
to bear testimony to the vast amount of historical material 
which rendered it an indispensable accompaniment of every 
library in New England history, notwithstanding its vagaries 
and inaccuracies. 

Mather had omitted from the " Magnalia " an extended life 
of Governor Dudley, which he had prepared, substituting for 
it a brief statement. In 1858 his longer memoir came into 
Mr. Deane's hand in a modern transcript ; but he could not be 



29 

induced to print it without reference to the original manu- 
script. At a later day this original — not indeed in Mather's 
hand — came to the Society among some Dudley papers ; and 
our Proceedings for January, 1870, preserve it to us with 
the advantage of Mr. Deane's scrutinizing oversight. 

Notwithstanding the secondary character of Hubbard as an 
historian, Mr. Deans took a peculiar pleasure in seeing that 
the Society's early reprint (1815) of his history, which had 
been made from an imperfect copy, was completed ; and when 
he laid the recovered pages of the book before the Society in 
February, 1878, he prefaced them with a statement which told 
the story. 

In 1862 he conducted an amicable controversy, before the 
Historical Society, with the late Colonel A spin wall on the 
genuineness of the Narragansett Patent, which was granted, 
as was professed by the magistrates of Massachusetts, in 1643. 
Shrouded in mystery, as Mr. Deane allowed the document to 
be, and indiifcing a conflict of jurisdiction, it was characteristic 
of his umpiring as a judge of historic probabilities, not to al- 
low a document to be fraudulent or a forgery, if the way was 
not rendered thereby clearer to a final settlement of doubts. 
He would not abandon confidence in a paper simply to increase 
the perplexity of a question. He always seemed to have a 
personal interest in seeing any historical controversy brought 
to an ultimate decision. " I always like to see historical ques- 
tions settled," he said on this occasion. " It would be grat- 
ifying in many respects to be able to concur in all these 
statements ; but I am not quite able to do so " ; and no 
emphasis of contrary asseveration could have carried greater 
weight. I remember the particular delight he felt, when in 
1881 he received one of Henry Stevens's catalogues, and found 
in it the evidence that Ferdinando Gorges was not account- 
able for the insertion among his father's tracts of Johnson's 
"Wonder-working Providence," which with later writers had 
brought upon the son some severe condemnation. He had 
himself considered the suspicious circumstances in a review of 
Mr. Poole's edition of Johnson's book, in the "North Ameri- 
can Review" in 1868. He felt that he had done a duty to 
a maligned innocent when he cited the proof that freed the 
memory of the younger Gorges of the charge. 

In 1865 he gave a certain dignity at the outset to the Prince 



30 

Society in editing their initial reprint of Wood's " New Eng- 
lands Prospect." 

In the year after his return from Europe the American Anti- 
quarian Society profited by his researches there in the publica- 
tion which he made in their Proceedings (April, 1867) of the 
Records of the Council for New England, bringing to its eluci- 
dation of his abundant knowledge ; and at a later day, in 
October, 1875, he was pleased to be able to add farther to the 
elucidation. The studies for this naturally conducted him 
afresh to the methods which obtained in the early days, through 
which legal possession was acquired in the soil of New Eng- 
land. He was never steadier in perception or riper in judg- 
ment than when he read, in December, 1869, his paper on 
" The Forms used in issuing Letters Patent by the Crown of 
England." It was a question involving large historical knowl- 
edge and not a little legal aptitude ; and he made no failure 
in marshalling in his own mind side by side the historical ele- 
ments of the question from his own resources, and the legal 
side from his conferences with the highest authorities which 
our Massachusetts Bar could offer. He did it in a way that 
drew forth the commendation of Judge Parker. He had no 
unvarying pride of opinion, though he clung to his opinions as 
long as he could. He had, in the paper that first drew upon 
him the attention of leading members of this Society, sided 
with those who have granted to Endicott the honor of being 
the first governor of Massachusetts. His more mature opinion 
led him to other conclusions in this paper of 1869. 

I hardly remember more than two historical controversies, 
among the many which had engaged his attention, in which Mr. 
Deane showed more grief than impatience at wrong-headed- 
ness. The first of these was the effort which for some years 
was made by some strenuous disciples of local pride in Maine 
— his own State — to rehabilitate the fame of the abortive 
Popham Colony with all the concomitants of a settled and 
fruitful purpose, with the aim of proving it the parent colony 
of New England. He watched their deliberate endeavors for 
some years, more with wonder than with pain, and only in 
the effort to make a crowning demonstration in 1871 did he 
enter his protest ; and he later embodied his views in a report 
of his remarks which were printed in the " Boston Daily 
Advertiser" of Sept. 2, 1871. 



31 

The other controversy was the more recent one, which grew 
out of the stand which this Society took in 1880, when the at- 
tempt was made to accentuate the alleged geographical cer- 
tainties of the Icelandic Sagas in erecting the statue of a 
Northman in Boston. His words were sober. " To elevate 
these sagas," he said, " to the dignity of historical relations 
with their details, and to put implicit reliance on their data as 
to time and place, seems to me unwarrantable. They are 
shadowy and mystical in form, and often uncertain in meaning." 

If the Popham question had been one where the affirmative 
contestants had yielded in a certain sense to State pride, the 
character and acts of Roger Williams have usually banded 
together as his advocates the writers of Rhode Island, and 
given to the defenders of Massachusetts a solid rank of cen- 
sors more or less warm in their feelings. No man looked his 
own side more squarely in the face when he thought it should 
quail, than Mr. Deane did. He recognized the overbearing 
ardor of the Massachusetts people when their interests came 
in conflict with those of their weaker neighbors ; and more 
than once he bore testimony to his faith in what in one of 
his earliest writings, quoting from Polybius, he called the eye 
of history, — truth. But as a student of the world's stages of 
progress, he failed to see how the action of Roger Williams, 
in endeavoring to upset the common polity of his time, could 
be suffered in any self-respecting community which was mak- 
ing a struggle for existence, as the Bay Colony in those days 
was ; and in a paper which he read to this Society, in Febru- 
uary, 1873, he might well maintain that Williams, in trying to 
invalidate the royal grants, " flew in the face of the public law 
of the world at that time." ' 

Mr. Deane took much satisfaction in the publications of 
Hakluyt, — he possessed the original editions of all his books, 
— and I have often seen them at his side as he was work- 
ing in his study. His interest in all that related to the 
claims of England to the northern continent — claims derived 
from the voyages of the Cabots, father and son — and his 
study of the urgency of the friends of English colonization 
often took him to the collections of their great champion. 

1 He had already touched the question in his notice of the first volume — 
"Williams's " Key " — of the publications of the Narragansett Club, in the " North 
American Review," April, 1868. 



32 

Hakluyt's volumes were the great starting-point of his inter- 
est in the Cabots, and he was led to a study of what records 
we have to determine the sizes of the little ships of the 
early voyagers across the Atlantic. He prepared a paper on 
this subject in 1865, and in October of the same year he spoke 
to the Antiquarian Society of " the exceedingly meagre and 
unsatisfactory accounts which have been submitted of the 
voyages of the Cabots, and suggested," as the records read, 
" the propriety of the Society's taking measures to have a 
memoir on that subject prepared." From this time he was 
looked to as the fittest person to meet expectations on this 
subject. We have seen that in the next year he studied 
afresh the Cabot mappe-monde of 1544 at Paris ; and his in- 
terest was quickened by the words which Buckingham Smith 
had spoken to him of the desirableness of a closer study of 
its inscriptions ; and all this bore fruit in the copy of them 
which he later procured, and which since his death has been 
laid before this Society by Mr. Smith. He now procured 
Jomard's copy of the map, and gave it to the Antiquarian 
Society in April, 1867. I had been so long conversant with 
his interest in this subject, and knew so well how closely he 
had scrutinized Biddle's " Life of Sebastian Cabot," that when 
it devolved on me, in 1882, to assign the chapter on the 
Cabots in the " Narrative and Critical History of America," 
there was no choice, — the assignment was foreordained. It 
was while he was at work on this — one of the most critically 
skilful treatises of the book — that we availed together of the 
visit which Mr. Winthrop was about making to Europe, to 
engage that gentleman's interposition to secure a full-sized 
photograph of the map with its marginal inscriptions. I com- 
municated with a few libraries and individuals, and got a circle 
of ten to share the expense. The reproduction was so suc- 
cessful that the photographer claimed the privilege of exhib- 
iting his work at an exposition then going on in Paris, as 
embodying the most successful results in so difficult a piece 
of photography which at that time had been reached. In 
October, 1882, Mr. Deane had the satisfaction of laying an 
advanced copy of this photograph before the Antiquarian 
Society at Worcester. 

Meanwhile he had in other ways linked his name with 
Hakluyt's, as a modern commentator on a manuscript of the 



cr- 33 

old collector. When Dr. Woods, his friend and the President 
of Bowdoin College, was in England, not far from the time of 
Mr. Deane's own visit, he had secured from the library of Sir 
Thomas Phillipps a copy of a paper by Hakluyt, on " West- 
erne Planting," in which that writer had come again to the 
task which he began in his " Divers Voyages " of instilling 
into the English mind some sense of the opportunities which 
were offered for securing English supremacy in the northern 
parts of the New World. The paper was in its nature histori- 
cal, in enumerating what other nations had done and in show- 
ing how there was an opening for English enterprise. Dr. 
Woods was eager to meet the wishes of the friends of the 
Maine Historical Society, in procuring some new and striking 
material for their publications ; and the Society was just at this 
time entering upon a more vigorous career than had before dis- 
tinguished it. Though this subject was " a comparatively new 
field of study for Dr. Woods," he entered upon a plan of edit- 
ing the manuscript with eagerness, and early had recourse to 
Mr. Deane and his library for help. A few years later, when 
the body of the text had been stereotyped in Cambridge under 
the supervision of Mr. Deane, a fire (1873) in the house of 
Dr. Woods at Brunswick, Maine, destroyed his library, though 
the rough notes of an intended preface and introduction to 
the book were saved, while a few other fragments of this per- 
formance were in Mr. Deane's hands. The blow levelled at 
a man no longer robust fell heavily upon Dr. Woods, and it 
soon became evident that he was unfit to proceed with his 
task. Mr. Deane was called upon to complete the labor. He 
worked Dr. Woods's notes and unfinished paragraphs into a 
continuous narrative, and the joinery with its gaps filled was 
submitted to Dr. Woods for his approval. This received, the 
book was published by the Maine Historical Society as "A 
Discourse concerning Western Planting, written in the year 
1584 by Richard Hakluyt, now first printed from a contem- 
porary manuscript, with a preface and an introduction by 
Leonard Woods, LL.D. ; edited with notes in an appendix 
by Charles Deane (Cambridge, 1877)." The appendix occu- 
pies a third of the volume. The task with Dr. Woods living 
was delicately performed ; and when the original editor died, 
Mr. Deane paid him a kindly tribute, in January, 1879, at a 
meeting of our Society. 

5 



34 ,, 

Another result of Dr. Woods's visit to the Phillipps collec- 
tion had been the procuring of a letter and abstracts of other 
epistles written by Edward Randolph while he was gaining 
the designation of being " the evil genius of New England " ; 
and these, together with Randolph's narrative, in a better copy 
than had been printed in the " Andros Tracts," Mr. Deane 
communicated to our Society in November, 1880. These were 
but manifestations of the study which he had long given to 
the efforts which had been made from time to time b}' inter- 
ested persons to vacate the first charter of Massachusetts Bay. 
When just about this time it fell to the present writer to plan 
and carry forward a "Memorial History of Boston," in recog- 
nition of the completion of two hundred and fifty years since 
the founding of the city by Winthrop, its editor naturally 
turned to Mr. Deane to elucidate that long struggle of the 
Colony, so closely connected with Boston history, to thwart 
the machinations of the enemies of the Colony, and to pre- 
serve its charter. He did the work with extreme care and 
with patent skill. 

When two years later the same editor was called upon to 
enter into a much larger field of supervision, by bringing 
nearly forty writers into conjunction, in covering in a mono- 
graphic and critical fashion the entire range of American his- 
tory, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and all else, as well as 
its aboriginal and archaeological aspects, he entered upon the 
task with the full recognition of the lightening of his labor 
which he could expect from his nearest neighbor and friend, 
and with a thorough acquaintance with what he could hope 
for from Mr. Deane's wonderfully rich library. Such environ- 
ments did not a little reconcile me to the formidableness of 
the task. During the eight years while it occupied my at- 
tention, I never failed of sympathy and encouragement, and 
the lawn between our "houses had its path which was almost 
daily trod to his study. He was never so occupied but his 
pen was laid down, and I was by his kindly manner invited to 
make my levy upon his manifold resources. It has been a 
great regret to me that he did not live to see the work com- 
pleted. The last volume never fell under his scrutiny. 

I have already mentioned how I turned to him at once for 
the elucidation of the Cabot voyages. With equal confidence 
I assigned to him the section which was to cover the history of 



35 

New England down to the Revolution of Andros. The sur- 
vey which he made in the critical essay, appended to the 
narrative, of the original as well as secondary sources of that 
history, took him anew over a ground which was everywhere 
imprinted with his own footsteps. 

He had long studied Massachusetts history on those sides 
which had elicited strictures on her people and their methods. 
He stood like a champion where he thought there was justice 
to be awarded, and he drojDped the screen with equal facility 
if he felt that her people had swerved from the straightest 
paths. The whole question of her connection with the en- 
slaving of negroes found its culmination for him in the Con- 
stitution of 1780, and in the relation of its Bill of Rights 
to the evil which it was held to eradicate. In 1860 he had 
been asked to consider the printed report of the Committee 
which presented a form of constitution for Massachusetts in 
1780. He well knew, as every student of our State history 
does know, how the question of the al)olishment of slavery 
within its borders had from an early date in the last century 
been the subject of consideration ; but " obstacles and em- 
barrassments," especially in the time of the royal governors, 
stood in the way. In September, 1868, he had laid before the 
Society a communication, which is still on file at the State 
House, and which the Legislature of Massachusetts had in 
1777 — the year following the Declaration of Independence 
— prepared for bringing the question to the notice of the Con- 
gress at Philadelphia. He well knew that the feeling and 
the sounding phrase which embodied it — namely, that all 
men are created equal — was, in those boiling days of eman- 
cipation of thought, common enough to fill the air and be- 
come the common property of those who were at that time 
framing bills of rights for the States and a Declaration of In- 
dependence for the land. But it was the act which converted 
these generalities into a deed of enfranchisement which inter- 
ested Mr. Deane. When, in April, 1874, Chief Justice Gray 
placed before this Society the note-book of Chief Justice Gush- 
ing on the case of the Commonwealth versus Jennison, where 
it was held that such a general sentence in the Massachusetts 
Bill of Rights had abolished slavery in the State, the question 
was first raised at our meetings of the tradition which assigned 
to Judge Lowell, rather than to John Adams, the introduc- 



36 

tion of that all-powerful phrase into the Bill of Rights. This 
led to Mr. Deane's paper on Judge Lowell and the Massachu- 
setts Bill of Rights, in which he traced all these ebullitions of 
fervor back to the prevailing sentiments which the opening 
scenes of the Revolution had engendered. 

Mr. Deane also contributed, and elucidated with preface and 
notes, a mass of original papers respecting slavery in Massa- 
chusetts, which appeared in the Collections of our Society 
in 1877. 

One of the last of the elaborate papers which Mr. Deane 
wrote was embodied in the Report of the Council of the Anti- 
quarian Society, October, 1886, in which he reviewed the con- 
nection of Massachusetts with the slave-trade and slavery. It 
had not long before been said in the Senate at Washington, in 
the heat of political debate, that " Massachusetts was the 
nursing mother of the horrors of the middle passage." A law- 
yer who was his neighbor at Cambridge urged Mr. Deane to 
reply to this hazardous charge; but he declined the task in 
favor of his friend. Failing health prevented this friend from 
bringing his studies for a paper to a conclusion, and Mr. Deane 
finally received from him his incomplete essay. Mr. Deane 
now entered with thoroughness and insight upon the task of 
tracing the rise of slavery on the American continent, and of 
the hand which England bore in creating the traffic in bond- 
men and making it commercially successful. " The share 
which Massachusetts had in the planting of slavery in the New 
World," he said, " was but a drop in the bucket compared 
with that of England." He made no concealment of the busi- 
ness interests which were promoted by the traffic in Boston 
and Salem ; but from the time of Samuel Sewall, at least, 
" there was always a protest from the heart of the people 
against this crime to humanity, which erelong made itself felt 
as a controlling influence in the community," 

The reputation which Mr. Deane has left behind him is that 
of an historical scholar almost peerless among his American 
contemporaries, if we separate this condition from that of a 
writer. He has not associated his name with any great, long- 
sustained piece of historical writing, but he has raised as a 
monument of his labors the image of an untiring investigator, a 
conscientious painstaker in research, and an exemplar for judi- 



37 

cial fairness. There was no topic too minute for his thorougli- 
ness. He dearly loved to drive the smallest error from the 
field. It was a pleasure for him to rehabilitate a forgotten 
fact. 

I have often heard him speak of one of the earliest of the 
minor investigations which he had made. He saved all the 
scraps, correspondence, and prints respecting it, and had them 
arranged in a book. He seemed to look upon it as one of the 
primal indications of his spirit of minute research, and on his 
death-bed expressed a wish to have that scrap-book placed in 
the library of our Society, where it now is. An attempt had 
been made to palm off a portrait of Franklin as that of Roger 
Williams, and Mr. Deane's purpose had been to expose the 
deceit. I remember when, man}^ years afterward, the original 
fraud was again brought to light from the obscurity to which 
he had consigned it, how his old interest revived as once more 
he came to the rescue of the truth. He took a similar interest 
in the deceit which was practised in 1772, when some one em- 
ployed Paul Revere to engrave a likeness of Charles Churchill, 
the English poet, which the publisher of the Newport edition 
of Church's narrative made to pass for a picture of the old 
Indian fighter by having a powder-horn slung over the poet's 
shoulders. The fraud had been observed before Mr. Deane 
referred to it in 1858 ; but he was not able for many years to 
put in juxtaposition the exact print from which Revere must 
have worked. He accidentally discovered it in an old maga- 
zine of 1768 ; and he was led, in February, 1882, to bring the 
matter afresh before the Historical Society with the completed 
proof in reproductions of the two engravings. 

When Dr. Palfrey was in England he endeavored to dis- 
cover some document with a perfect copy of the seal of the 
Council for New England, and Mr. Deane renewed the search 
at a later day. The only seal known was a fragment patched 
together which hangs from the patent of Plymouth Colony 
preserved in the Plymouth archives. As I saw it with Mr. 
Deane in 1882, I thought two men, one with a bow, could be 
made out as part of the device. Dr. Palfrey at a much earlier 
day said it was so broken and defaced that the design was un- 
distinguishable. When that writer issued a new edition of his 
first volume in 1865, he gave on his titlepage as the seal of the 
Council the arms which appear on John Smith's map of New 



38 

England ; and he was led to adopt it by a letter of Mr. Deane's, 
dated June 10, 1865, which foreshadowed the line of argu- 
ment in a paper which was printed in the Proceedings of this 
Society in 1867. The later investigations of Mr. Baxter, of 
the Maine Historical Society, when he was prompted by 
another fragment found in the " Trelawuy Papers," threw 
considerable doubt on the correctness of Mr. Deane's earlier 
reasons ; and in the last paper which he wrote touching the 
subject, he warned his readers of this counter-presentation. 

It is hardly necessary to cite all of the small investigations 
with which Mr. Deane enriched the Proceedings of the His- 
torical and Antiquarian Societies for many years, to increase 
the evidence that his pertinacity in search was just as con- 
spicuous in small as in great matters. It will be seen in his 
communications regarding Phillis Wheatley (1863 and 1864) ; 
in his suppljdng (1864) the historical associations of an in- 
scribed plate found at Castine, commemorating a Capuchin 
mission there in 1648, while the late Charles Folsom supplied 
the philological test; in his comments (1866) on John Wheel- 
wright's Fast Day sermon of 1636-1637 ; in his paper on 
Washington's headquarters at Cambridge (September, 1872) ; 
in one on the ancient rules of Harvard College (1876); in 
another on an indenture of David Thomson, a contribution 
(1876) to the early history of Piscataqua ; in his remarks on 
the genuineness of the Verrazano letter before the Antiquarian 
Society, in January, 1876 ; in the part which he took (1877- 
1878) in the lively controversy over the identity of the belfry 
where Paul Revere hung his lantern on the eve of the affairs 
at Lexington and Concord ; in his introduction to Dr. Bel- 
knap's Journal of his tour (1876) ; in that to his edition (1878) 
of the Journal of the President and Council of New Hampshire ; 
in his remarks (1878) on the diary of Henry Flynt, the old 
college tutor ; in his comments (1880) on the petition for a 
grant of land from Roger Conant in his old age ; in his eager 
recital (1883) about what remains of the old American library 
of White-Kennett ; in his story (1885) of the kidnapping by 
the old navigator Waymouth in 1605 of Indians on the Maine 
coast ; and in the curious researches which he made to estab- 
lish the priority of the two editions of the map of New Eng- 
land in Hubbard's History (1887-1888). 
■ No one knew better than Mr. Deane what the perils of 



39 

investigation are, and how a tendency to jump at conclusions 
must be resisted. In reading tlie reports of some of the papers 
on anthropology read at a meeting of the American Associa- 
tion for tlie Advancement of Science, held at Chicago in 1868, 
his historic sense had been wronged by some of their hasty 
processes ; and he took occasion, in preparing the Report of the 
Council of the Antiquarian Society in that year, to draw atten- 
tion to this unsteady tendency. " Men must be trained," he 
said, " to be careful observers of facts, without which no sys- 
tem can stand. It is natural for the human mind to ask ques- 
tions and to form theories upon such new facts presented to it, 
and, indeed, in this way is knowledge increased, and true sci- 
ence finally attained ; but the difficulty is that in all investi- 
gations of this nature there are those who assume the facts 
to be proved, and then proceed to construct crude theories 
upon them." Nor did he undervalue the labor of all good 
work. I remember how on a visit which I made with him to 
Plymouth in company with a number of young students, he 
surprised us all, when we s'at in the hotel parlor waiting for 
our dinner, after we had been the rounds of the sights in the 
town, by taking from his pocket half a dozen of the little thin 
tracts illustrating the early history of the Pilgrims, which 
he had brought from his own shelves. He took them one by 
one and explained their value, and showed how it was by 
arduous critical analysis and by comparison of statements 
that the truth was worked out. He felt that the layman 
had no conception of this, when he read the finished paper 
of the historian. He expressed himself upon this point in 
what he said upon the death of Mr. Frothingham : "-Per- 
sons not familiar with investigations of this nature are not 
aware of the amount of labor involved ; the mass of documents 
to be collected, read, and digested, — such as orderly books 
[he was referring to Mr. Frothingham's particular field of 
study], letters, depositions, newspapers, old half-effaced rec- 
ords, — from these to sift out the evidence, arrange it, and 
bring order out of chaos : all this is no ordinary labor." He 
was also fond of referring to that sort of microscopical inquiry 
without which sometimes important bibliographical decision 
could not be reached. He was never quite content with a 
book that was in any way cardinal in such investigations, un- 
less he could find a copy in the original binding. " Books are 



40 

robbed of their iDtegrity," he said at one time; " and those vol- 
umes for which the robbery is made, owing to ignorance or in- 
difference, are often supplied with illustrations — maps and 
plates — which do not belong to them. This is an evil greatly 
to be deplored, for historical investigation is often thwarted 
by the existence of such books." He kept a good array of 
dictionaries and glossaries at his side, and I have known him 
stop to trace the archaic use of a word upon which some his- 
torical elucidation depended. I remember once he took me 
into his counsels to determine whether the word " church " 
in a certain connection meant the edifice or the body of wor- 
shippers. " Misapprehension and errors arise," he said, " by 
not paying sufficient attention to the meaning of words and 
terms as they are found in old books." 

His honesty in research was unimpeachable. No matter 
what his preconceived notions, his local pride, his friendly in- 
terest, his national ]3redilections, they all stood for nothing in 
his quest for the truth. There is a conspicuous example of this 
kind of historical bravery in the paper — on the Convention 
of Saratoga, between Gates and Burgoyne, and the way in 
which the American Congress observed its terms — which he 
gave to the Antiquarian Society in 1877. 

All these traits could but give him the highest position as 
an historical student with all who had occasion to track him in 
his work. Mr. Winthrop, in his oration at Plymouth in 1870, 
did not give him too high praise when he placed him almost 
above all others, for the light he had thrown upon the early 
history of New England ; and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 
in his editing of Morton's " New English Canaan," while cit- 
ing a production of Mr. Deane's, is not likely to be criticised 
for saying that " in dealing with the sources of history it is 
only permissible to refer to contemporaneous authorities." 
" Mr. Deane, however," he adds, " so far as New England his- 
tory is concerned, may fairly be made an excej)tion to this rule. 
His knowledge is so exhaustive, and his accuracy is so great, 
that a reference to him I consider just as good and as permis- 
sible as a reference to the original authorities." 

Mr. Deane was a man of strong friendships, and in his later 
years he liked to recall his old friends. He looked back upon 
his intimacy with George Livermore as having almost a for- 



41 

mative influence upon him. His intercourse with Mr. Liver- 
more went back to about 1844, and it was one of the earliest 
of those which he formed on the ground of intellectual sym- 
pathies. He was attracted toward his friend, as he afterward 
recorded, " by his loving and genial nature, his general intel- 
ligence, his historical tastes, and his great love for books." For 
many years he and Mr. Livermore were accustomed to make 
an annual visit together to the patriarchal Josiah Quincy at 
his country home ; and he speaks, in his memoir of Mr. Liver- 
more (1869), of his friend's "almost romantic admiration for 
the heroic qualities " of their host. 

Mr. Edward A. Crowninshield was another of these early 
friends ; but at his death, in 1859, Mr. Deane failed of an op- 
portunit}' to acquire some memorial of him from his library, 
because it was sold as a whole and went to Europe. It was 
not long, however, before two much desired and extremely rare 
books returned to this country, and found their way into Mr. 
Deane's library. These were books that he often showed with 
satisfaction, — Elder Cushman's Sermon, delivered at Ply- 
mouth in 1621 ; and the 1582 edition of Hakluyt. At a much 
later date (1880), Mr. Deane wrote a brief memoir of his friend 
for our Proceedings. 

Another early friend was the late Mr. John Russell Bartlett, 
who was a bookseller in New York, when about 1846 he and 
Mr. Deane became acquainted. At a later day, when Mr. 
Bartlett was the custodian of the great Carter-Brown library 
in Providence, that collection became a new bond of common 
interest between them. 

It was in October, 1849, that Mr. Savage, then President 
of this Society, welcomed Mr. Deane into the communion 
of its members. Mr. Savage was then preparing his great 
Dictionary ; and a file of letters among Mr. Deane's papers 
shows the constancy of the great genealogist's new friend in 
his efforts to help the elder student in his work. When in 
March, 1873, Mr. Deane recalled the Society as it was at the 
time of his becoming a member, of the fifty-eight upon its roll 
at the time of his own election only eighteen were living at 
Mr. Savage's death. Mr. Deane, in his remarks on this com- 
memoration of their former president, tersely put his impres- 
sions of his old friend and his almost oppressive spirit of 
accuracy : " He always meant to be right: he always felt that 



42 

he was right ; he took nothing upon trust." In 1874 he pre- 
pared a brief notice of Mr. Savage for the Transactions of the 
American Academy. 

The death of Mr. Haven, in 1881, came very near to Mr. 
Deane. At a meeting of the Antiquarian Society in October 
of that year, he spoke more at length of the loss than he was 
accustomed to do on such occasions. " A feeling of sadness 
sometimes comes over me at these annual gatherings," he said, 
"occasioned by the absence from time to time of familiar 
faces. One by one they vanish, and the places that knew 
them know them no more. It is now more than twenty-five 
years since I first began to attend these meetings, having been 
elected a member here thirty years ago this day ; and the 
Boston members — Mr. Folsom, Mr. Livermore, Mr. Frothing- 
ham, and Dr. Shurtleff, all of whom, alas ! have passed on — 
always regarded the 21st of October as a red-letter day in 
their calendar, and came up hither as on a sacred pilgrimage. 
For a number of years we always met here, and received a 
cordial welcome from the venerable Governor Lincoln, Judge 
Barton, Judge Chapin, Judge Thomas, and others whom I 
need not name." In 1885 Mr. Deane contributed a memoir of 
Mr. Haven to the Proceedings of our Society. Of Mr. Froth- 
ingham, whom he thus recalled, he had spoken to us on the 
announcement of his death in February, 1880, and printed a 
memoir in the "Proceedings" of February, 1885. There were 
two others of our members of whom Mr. Deane could write 
with full knowledge ; and these were Dr. Appleton, whom he 
commemorated in 1877, and Dr. Robbins, who claimed the 
tribute in 1882. 

Another Cambridge friend of the days before the war was one 
in whose labors he and I had a common interest ; and he spoke 
to me more frequently of him, perhaps, than of most others 
whom he had known in the earlier part of his career, because 
of my own studies in the same field. This was Dr. Kohl, 
who did in Cambridge a considerable part of his work on the 
treatises which he prepared for the Coast Survey touching early 
discoveries along the American coasts. He had depended not 
a little, as his work proceeded, on Mr. Deane's encouragement 
and assistance, and on the help which he derived from the 
unmatched collection of maps in the College Library. At a 
later day, when he recalled how the financial troubles of 1857 



43 

made the government indisposed to go on with the task of 
illustrating the early discoveries through Dr. Kohl's instru- 
mentality, he spoke of the good German's distress of mind 
at being thus checked in his work, and said tliat his friend 
returned to Germany almost broken-hearted. " His beautiful 
maps, some of which I have seen at Washington, are now 
uncared for ; and it is only by a knowledge of these old and 
useless maps [as he described the originals of Kohl's copies] 
that the history of geography and discovery can be written." It 
was by sharing these views of the value of such cartographical 
records, that while engaged in kindred studies I was brought 
into conferences about them with Mr. Deane at different times, 
and finally determined to make an examination of Kohl's work. 
Mr. Deane had referred to it in a report to the Antiquarian 
Society in 1860, and he had expressed a hope that the results 
of Kohl's investigations, as they existed in his elaborate copies 
of old maps and in the treatises accompanying them, — one of 
which had come into the possession of that Society, — might 
not be lost to the world. Later in October, 1869, the same 
Society sought to initiate measures to induce the government 
to publish these memorials ; but Mr. Deane, knowing how the 
science of historical cartography had then begun to grow 
rapidly, and aware, from the correspondence which he kept 
up with Dr. Kohl, that that gentleman had himself outgrown 
some of his earl}^ studies, urged that nothing should be pub- 
lished till Dr. Kohl had had the opportunity to revise his 
work. Nothing, however, was done ; and in 1878 it became 
Mr. Deane's duty to speak in his memory at a meeting of this 
Society, when he read from the last letter which he had 
received from that German geographer. 

Now that no chance of revision was possible by their author, 
arrangements were made by Avhich the collection of maps in 
the State Department at Washington was for an interval 
transferred to the College Library in Cambridge, and I began 
the study of the charts and the notes attached, which resulted 
in a published calendar of the collection (1886). Mr. Deane 
followed me in this labor with much interest ; and the maps 
seemed to him like old friends, reviving his recollections of 
the daj^s when he used to visit Kohl's studio in Cambridge 
and watch his labors. 

There had been great advances in this comparative study of 



44 

historical geography since Dr. Kohl did his work, and it was 
very apparent, both to me and to Mr. Deane, that while the 
drawings were still valuable in so far as they preserved maps 
in European collections which had not been published, the 
notes which Dr. Kohl had annexed to them needed too much 
revision to be available for publication. We procured from 
Worcester the section of the written study of these topics 
which the Antiquarian Society possessed, and it stood the 
advanced tests of improved scholarship no better ; and it was 
with some sorrow that Mr. Deane as well as I saw mean- 
while that the Coast Survey in 1884 published one of Dr. 
Kohl's memoirs remaining in their hands. It was an injus- 
tice to its author's memory to make known at that time what 
he had written thirty years before. 

Harvard College conferred upon Mr. Deane the degree of 
Master of Arts in 1856 ; and when the University celebrated 
its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1886, and repre- 
sentative men from all parts of the country were called to her 
festival to receive honor at her hands, Mr. Deane stood up be- 
fore the assembly, and received from President Eliot the des- 
ignation of " antiquary and historian, a master among students 
of American history," while he was made a Doctor of Laws. 
Bowdoin had conferred the same degree upon him in 1871. 
As early as 1853 he had been chosen into the Harvard Chap- 
ter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. 

Mr. Deane was made a member of the Massachusetts Histor- 
ical Society in October, 1849 ; and when Mr. Winthrop be- 
came President in 1855, he was the chairman of the Standing 
Committee. It was the dawn of a new life in the Society. 
" I well remember," he said at a later day, " the time and 
labor spent in the attempt to bring order out of chaos." He 
had been on the Publishing Committee earlier, but this year 
was signalized by his triumph with the manuscript of Bradford. 
He and the President were instrumental at this time in print- 
ing an issue of the proceedings of a single meeting (April 12, 
1855) ; and by so doing they established a prototype for the 
printed series of such publications, which was not regularly 
begun till 1858. The Dowse library soon came to our Society ; 
and Mr. Deane was as active in giving a proper arrangement to 
it as he was in settling the preliminaries of printing the cata- 



45 

logue of the Society's libraiy. In 1863 he became chairman of 
the committee on publishing the Proceedings ; and for a series 
of fourteen years his interest never flagged, and his ripened 
scholarship permeated nearly all that the Society printed in 
this form. In the tribute which he paid to Dr. Robbins, he 
recalled this happy assiduity. "Almost any day at high 
noon," he said, " we two were quite likely to meet at the 
rooms, and to be joined by the President and other officers and 
members, when the -interests of the Society were considered, 
and kindred themes discussed." A new committee in 1878 
taking charge, they referred to his labors in saying that " nine 
volumes issued under his supervision within fourteen years 
attest his unwearied industry, his scrupulous accuracy, and 
the soundness of his judgment on historical questions." But 
his services were not to be dispensed with. He was in April, 
1878, named, with the Treasurer of the Society, to prepare the 
earlier proceedings for publication ; and in 1879-1880 the two 
volumes which completed the monthly record of the Society's 
activity previous to 1858 were published, showing in their 
notes and memoirs the useful contributions of the editors in 
their harmonious labors. In 1884 he did his final service on 
the Society's Collections, by editing the Trumbull Papers. In 
June, 1886, he took great pleasure in welcoming the members 
at his own house in Cambridge ; and as a part of the enter- 
tainment he laid before them a number of letters of Dr. 
Priestley addressed to the Hon. George Thacher. 

His connection with the American Antiquarian Society was 
only less intimate than that with the Historical Society. In 
1850 he met Mr. Haven, the Secretary of the Society, at Mr. 
Livermore's house, and they talked together of the rise of the 
Massachusetts Company, — a subject which Mr. Haven had just 
illustrated by printing in the Proceedings of the Society the 
records of that company. It led to a correspondence, and on 
Oct. 23, 1851, Mr. Deane was chosen a member of the Society. 
In 1856 he became a member of the Publishing Committee, 
and never through the rest of his life relaxed his labors in its 
behalf. In 1860 he made for the first time the report of this 
committee, in which he gave a review of the manuscript 
material in the Society's cabinet. In 1865 he became a mem- 
ber of the Council, and in 1880 he succeeded George Bancroft 
as the Secretary for Domestic Correspondence, holding both 



46 

offices till his death. For the last ten years of his life, I 
was his companion on his visits to Worcester to attend the 
annual meetings, and he allowed nothing to stand in the way 
of his pilgrimage. 

He was made a member of the London Society of Anti- 
quaries in 1878. 

He became promptly a member of the American Historical 
Association when it was organized at Saratoga in 1884, and he 
valued the opportunity which he had at its sessions of meet- 
ing persons interested in researches kindred to his own, com- 
ing from every part of the country. It seemed to broaden his 
conceptions; and the younger members of the Association will 
bear testimony to the kindly interest which he never shrank 
from showing in them. 

He was a member of many other American historical 
societies, — the New England Historic, Genealogical Society 
(elected in 1845) ; the Rhode Island Historical Society 
(1847) ; the New York Historical Society (1852) ; the New- 
port Historical Society (1854) ; the Wisconsin Historical So- 
ciety (1856) ; the Maryland Historical Society (1868) ; the 
Long Island Historical Society (1868) ; the Maine Historical 
Society (1870) ; the Virginia Historical Society (1881) and 
the Essex Institute (1887). He was chosen into the Ameri- 
can Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1866. 

Toward the end of his life he began to show that his years 
had an increasing weight, but he did not relax his interest in 
his studies. In February, 1888, he drew the attention of the 
Historical Society to an old tract, William Morrell's " New 
England, or a briefe Enarration," and had intended to edit a 
reprint of it for the current volume of the Society's Proceed- 
ings ; but in May, 1889, he had to signify to the Committee that 
his strength was not equal to it. " His life," said the Com- 
mittee in their preface in accounting for the failure, "has been 
full and rich and fruitful during his membership here for nearly 
half a century." He had already, at the preceding meeting in 
April, 1889, announced his completion of the last work which 
he did among the Society's manuscripts, when he gave notice 
that the Cabinet would not yield sufficient material to consti- 
tute a memorial volume respecting the centenary of the Con- 
stitution of the United States, then in men's minds. The 



47 

meeting when he made this announcement was the last which 
he attended. His friends, and particularly the Society's libra- 
rian, Dr. Green, with his professional eye, saw that a change 
was upon him. He was urged not to attempt to attend the 
customary reception at the President's house, and went at 
once to Cambridge. I saw him a few weeks later, on return- 
ing from a journey, and found his interest in the Society still 
unflagging, and he was eager to listen to a brief recital of my 
wanderings. He soon became worse, and I saw him but a 
few times more. He died on the 13th of November, 1889, 
having just completed his seventy-sixth year ; and on the 
next day the President at a meeting of this Society briefly 
spoke of the deep shadow which pervaded the room where the 
presence of their first Vice-President had been so long a benef- 
icent satisfaction. 

In October the Council of the Antiquarian Society had 
passed at their annual meeting resolutions of sympathy and 
respect, and had sent them to his family. When news reached 
his Worcester friends of his death, the Council again convened, 
and after a tribute from the President, Mr. Stephen Salisbury, 
in which it was observed that Mr. Deane was the sixth in senior- 
ity at the time of his death, Senator Hoar spoke of him as the 
acknowledged chief and arbiter in historical knowledge, and 
of his great readiness to render aid to others. On December 3, 
at the house of Mr. Robert C. Winthrop, Jr., the Historical 
Society met to pay their last tribute ; and the printed record 
shows the way in which his old friends and his younger asso- 
ciates united in their affectionate remembrances. 















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